When dealing with physical systems, such as buildings, assemblies of buildings, a campus of buildings, cities, water networks, data centers, etc., it is important to be able to understand and characterize the physical processes such as air flow, water flow (including the flow of contaminants), power consumption, power generation, associated therewith. There exist in the market a vast number of products for the monitoring of physical systems and processes, typically providing a system operator with a dashboard style snapshot of what is happening to the physical systems of interest so that actions can be taken, either manually, or through some automated means, e.g., enabling automated shutdown when a process is running too “hot.” Tivoli Monitoring from International Business Machines Corporation is a popular monitoring platform of this kind which is typically used to monitor information technology (IT) devices and facilities type equipment (such as air conditioning and power distribution units) in data centers.
Additionally, there are numerous products available for modeling of physical processes, be they the flow of air in data centers, the flow of water in surface or ground water systems, or the flow of airborne or waterborne contaminants. The flow of such systems is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations and there are a variety of numerical solvers available for these equations. Some of these solvers are completely generic and some are geared to specific applications. Those geared to specific applications try to alleviate the need for the user to know anything about the underlying mathematics of the solvers, choosing to frame the input in terms that are more familiar to the target user population. Lists of freely available generic and application-specific computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers are readily available on the World Wide Web.
Finally, there are various applications for managing physical systems. For example, various building management systems (BMS) allow for the managing of a building's heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Sometimes these management systems incorporate a certain amount of monitoring capability, though none incorporate sensed data from third party sensors or other monitoring devices, and most importantly, none incorporate theoretical or numerical modeling of the underlying physical processes being monitored or managed.
Therefore techniques that enable the integrated and coordinated use of physical modeling and management, especially at the building and data center level would be desirable.